REPETITION/S: PERFORMANCE AND PHILOSOPHY IN LJUBLJANA

Erik Bryngelsson & Karl Sjölund (Yak Kallop) Unless Hamlet (performance) Deleuze saw in the works of the Italian machina attoriale Carmelo Bene an example of a minor author who worked on the virtual underside of the homogenous and invariable structure of a major language. Through his ”subtractive method”, Bene’s theatre moved towards a perversion of the surface of the represented world in a ”continuous variation” of stuttered utterances and hindered and amputated gestures.

For instance, in Bene’s Romeo and Juliette, Romeo, the organizing principle and the locus of the original conflict, is subtracted from the story. His absence permits, according to Deleuze, the unleashing of "a new potentiality of the theatre, an always unbalanced, non-representative force”. This non-representative or ”terrible force” set loose on the represented world projects itself into the future as a pure ”power of becoming”. But is this method of subtraction producing continuous variations?

Lorenzo Chiesa has pointed out Deleuze’s all too vitalist interpretation of Bene’s work.

Instead of the repeated subtraction producing something new, Bene’s method deindividualizes the representations of the stage, it brings forth the underlying mechanisms of the performance, that at the same times annihilates it by every subtraction. In this way, the ob-scene, that which is outside of the scene invades the scene, and un-makes representations from within. Following this line of enquiry, we wish to ask what would a ”theatre of the future” be that does not take a philosophical idea of repetition as its point of departure, but instead begins from ob-scene theatrical presentations and maybe even unmakes our conception of repetition from the inside of representation?

Yak Kallop (Erik Bryngelsson & Karl Sjölund) is a performance and theory collective based in Stockholm, Sweden. Since 2015 we’ve been producing stage works, situation based performances, essays and performance lectures dealing with questions of identity and representation. In Portable heterotopia (2015) a 9x4 metres wide tent was carried through the city centre of Gothenburg inside of which two actors repeatedly performed the dialogue and execution of Barabbas that could’ve taken place between Barabbas and a Roman soldier after his release and disappearance from the account of his life in the New Testament. In the stage play You should only lick the asses of the ones you love (2015) we expounded on the link between the repetitive habits enacted by the franciscan monks according to the monastic rules and theatrical gestures. In Ego boy going chronos (2016) we used the many iterations of the death of the father in Hamlet as a machine that would break down the chronological narrative, reversing it, and little by little, reducing the play to the pure form of the stage, as if, ex post facto, the original murder and even the story itself never even happened.

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